Box Turtle Bulletin

Pennsylvania Threatened With Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette is reporting that an anti-gay bill to amend the state’s constitution to permanently exclude same-sex couples from marriage has passed the Judiciary Committee of the Senate.

Over the protests of Sens. Jay Costa Jr., D-Forest Hills, and Jane Earll, R-Erie, the committee voted 10-4 to approve Senate Bill 1250 and send it to the Appropriations Committee, its next stop before it hits the Senate floor.

This proposed amendment is arrogant and punitive in that it not only reserves the privileges of marriage to heterosexuals but it also prohibits this legislature or future legislatures from providing civil unions or any other functionally equivalent consideration:

No union other than a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognizeds as marriage or the functional equivalent of marriage by the Commonwealth.

Not content to “protect marriage”, these anti-gays also want to ensure that gay couples cannot get equivalent workplace benefits, establish next-of-kin, visit their sick or make end of life decisions for their partner of decades, or many of the other accommodations that can be established by “functional equivalents”. This isn’t good government. It isn’t good religion. It’s bigotry and cruelty dressed up as piety.

To enshrine discrimination into the state’s constitution, this bill must do the following

The gay marriage ban has a long way to go. The bill must be approved not only by the current General Assembly, but also by the 2009-10 Legislature, whose members will be elected in November. If both sessions of the Legislature approve it, the amendment would go to a statewide referendum in November 2009.

Currently, the Senate has a Republican majority of 29 to 21.

In the Judiciary, only two Democrats and two Republicans voted against the bill. And in addition to the three Democrats who voted for the anti-gay bill in Judiciary, two others are listed as sponsors. In total 25 of the 50 Senators have either voted for or endorsed this amendment, fairly ensuring its passage should it reach the floor of the Senate.

The House has a narrow Democratic majority of 102 to 101. But as we have often seen, a Democratic majority in one house is not an assurance that anti-gay bigotry will be thwarted.

Now is the time for Pennsylvania gays to contact their legislators, especially those in the House of Representatives. We need every Democrat to hold fast against institutionalized discrimination. We need every fair-minded Republican to recognize that even if they don’t favor marriage equality, this amendment is over-kill. The “functional equivalent” clause proves that this is discrimination for the point of discrimination, not a measure to “protect” marriage.

Florida Anti-Marriage Initiative “Barely Meets Deadline”

First it was on, then it was off. Now it’s on again:

After four years of signature gathering, backers of a measure to deny family benefits for unmarried Floridians barely met the requirements to place the so-called “Florida Marriage Protection” constitutional amendment on the November ballot, according to state election officials.

Demographically, Florida has much in common with Arizona, particularly a large Senior Citizen base. And Florida’s proposed amendment, like Arizona’s would strip unmarried seniors from local protections and benefits due them because of their unmarried status. Seeing how difficult it has been to get the required number of signatures in such a socially conservative state, Florida looks like it will be shaping up into a very interesting battle.

The Florida Miracle?

Just a month ago gay Floridians were gearing up to face yet another anti-gay marriage amendment. Supporters of constitutional discrimination had cheered the meeting of their signature collection goal and disassembled their signature teams. They had met the magic number of 611,009.

But the most peculiar thing has happened. The petition collectors seem not to have kept their own count, relying on the state. And the state made an error by double counting signatures taken before a certain date from a certain county.

And the petition stands 22,000 signatures short. Now the anti-marriage efforts must start anew and get those signatures collected and validated before February 1.

If the tables were turned, we all know that Pat Robertson and company would be declaring this to be the glorious intervention of God. He had befuddled the minds of the enemy and confused their nefarious homosexual agenda.

But I’m not going to make such claims.

Activists on both sides of the issue predicted the shortfall will be overcome in time, though.

Florida4Marriage.org blasted an urgent e-mail to supporters Tuesday announcing the crisis and urging them to “pull out all stops” in collecting signatures during the next two weeks.

But if by some chance they are not able to get their signatures… well, I may be willing to see the hand of the divine.

Florida Republican Gov. Crist Won’t Push Anti-Marriage Amendment

The signatures are in and the campaign is on. Florida will be voting on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages — marriages which are already banned under state law. The Florida Republican Party put up nearly three-fourths of the funding to gather signatures, funding which abruptly ended when Gov. Charlie Crist took office and instructed the state GOP to not contribute any further. And now that the proposal has been certified to appear on the ballot, Gov. Crist has declined to offer his endorsement:

And even though he signed a petition to support the same-sex-marriage ban while he was running for office, he says he’s not interested in pushing the issue anymore.

“It’s not something that moves me,” he said last week.

Wisconsin’s “Anti-Family” Activist

Anti-gay activists know that public opposition to gay marriage seldom includes opposition to some other method of recognition for gay couples. So naturally they try to lump marriage in with civil unions or other vehicles when they prepare their amendments to ban recognition.

As lumping is not allowable under some states’ constitutions, these all inclusive amendments are often challenged. Leading the charge in Wisconsin is a relatively unknown University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh political science instructor, Bill McConkey, who thinks that Wisconsonites would never have voted to ban civil unions and that the amendment is thus unconstitutional.

Anti-gay activists often wail and moan about secular progressive, anti-Christian, anti-family homosexuals trying to overturn the will of the people. But according the the Star Tribune, Bill doesn’t meet their stereotype.

Q: You’ve described yourself as a Christian, straight, married, father of seven. You’re kind of an unlikely figure to be leading the charge on gay rights.

A: I’ve also been a Republican all my life, and people have said, that’s certainly a conflict but I don’t think so. The reason I don’t is because it’s consistent with my view of human dignity and human rights as opposed to government and the power of government. This is really an overreaching amendment.

Q: What was your motivation to file suit?

A: I thought it was horrible when it first came out, because of the implication of the precedent that it sets. If you don’t like gay people, who’s next? Short people? Or maybe we can go back to black people or to Jews or something. As a student of history and as an educated person, I know the history and the implications of that mind-set. It began with that. I also have a gay daughter. People have asked me, would you have filed this suit if it wasn’t for your daughter? To be real honest, maybe not. Maybe I would have just ranted and raved in my classrooms and written letters to the editor and fumed off to the side. But because of her, it also became a personal issue and I feel like I’m fighting for my kid. I’m a family man above all.

Although anti-gay activists like to hide behind the term “pro-family”, I think Bill McConkey illustrates what being pro-family is all about. Oh, and he doesn’t do a half-bad job of showing what “Republican principles” of governmental non-interference really look like.

Hate Crimes and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

Progress is slow here on this website, but then worthwhile progress is always slower than we’d like it to be. There are several new projects in the works, including a major examination of one of the most famous antigay tracts of the past few decades by one of most-quoted researchers. A sneak preview should be available in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile same-sex marriage continues to make the news in the U.S. Just last fall, Texas votors approved a ban against same-sex marriage in a lopsided vote during an off-year election. Just recently, the Virginia legislature voted to put a proposed constitutional ammendment before the votors in 2006. Several other states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania, are poised to take up the question as well. Meanwhile, efforts continue in Massachusetts to roll back gay marriage there.

Thirteen states voted to ban same-sex marriage in 2004, a year that saw significanltly hightened levels of antigay rhetoric. Some gay advocates predicted a backlash against gays and lesbians in the form of increased hate crimes, a prediction that was largely dismissed by opponents to marriage equality. Last fall the FBI released it’s Hate Crime Statistics for 2004 which showed somewhat mixed results nationwide. But in the states that voted to ban same-sex marriage that year, hate crimes against gays and lesbians rose significantly from the year before, strongly bucking the national trend. The FBI’s statistics bear out what we all instictively know: words have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are very serious indeed.

You can learn more about it in When Words Have Consequences: Hate Crimes and the Same Sex Marriage Debate.